SPN fic: Revelations 2/6 (Gen, PG-13)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Anita Peyton (neé Carlisle) had been born in Grand Rapids, lived there her entire life, and died there at age twenty-four. She left behind a husband, a widowed mother, and a baby daughter who would grow up to know her mother only from photographs. One of those photographs -- a laughing young woman in a white summer dress -- was prominently displayed on top of an upright piano in the immaculately clean living room where Mrs. Carlisle had conducted Victor and Winchester when they arrived to speak to Jeremy Peyton.
Peyton looked like the kind of guy who played quarterback in college and then married the homecoming queen -- blond, blue-eyed, and as wholesome as a man could possibly look in wrinkled sweats and a day's worth of stubble. He slumped against the back of his mother-in-law's pristine white leather couch, looking as if he'd never again have the strength to move from the spot.
Mrs. Carlisle had clearly made an attempt to pull herself together, putting on a clean blouse and skirt and pinning her hair up. But her eyes were bloodshot, and her voice trembled on the edge of breaking as she made the obligatory offer of coffee or tea.
"Coffee's fine, ma'am," Winchester said.
Victor had hoped to question Peyton alone while Winchester examined the burn site, but the kid had insisted on sticking with him, apparently determined not to miss a single second of the murder-investigating experience. Victor tried to remember if he'd ever been that young and gung-ho as a rookie, and decided that no, he'd always had more common sense than that.
Winchester's enthusiasm was wilting now, though, smothered by the thick atmosphere of grief in the room. He looked tense and awkward, and didn't offer even a token reaction when Victor hissed "Shut up and let me do the talking" into his ear as they took their seats.
Peyton's story was drearily familiar, differing only in minor details from what Victor had gotten from the other survivors. Peyton and his wife Anita had been in bed when their daughter started crying in her crib, and Anita had gone to check on her. Less than a minute later, Peyton had heard her scream. He'd rushed into the nursery to find the walls and ceiling already ablaze, his wife engulfed by the flames. It was all he'd been able to do to get the baby and himself out.
"There was no time," he kept repeating in a flat, shell-shocked voice. "I tried to get to her, there was no time. I couldn't... no time."
"We know you did all you could," Victor murmured awkwardly into his coffee cup. This was the part of the job he always hated most. He'd never found the right tone and manner to put grieving strangers at ease. He and Reidy had a suitable division of labor worked out. Reidy dealt with the victims and family members, with nervous witnesses and small children. Victor saved his normal brand of interrogation technique for recalcitrant witnesses and prime suspects. But Reidy wasn't there, and Winchester was an unknown quantity, which left Victor to muddle through.
He cleared his throat and tried to pitch his voice to something that at least vaguely resembled a soothing tone. "Mr. Peyton, Mrs. Carlisle. I know it's a painful topic to consider at a time like this, but can you think of anyone who might wish your family ill?"
Peyton gave him a dead-eyed stare. Mrs. Carlisle looked startled.
"Of course not!" she burst out. "I can't even imagine... do you really believe someone set that fire on purpose?"
"We're just trying to examine all the possibilities, ma'am. People can commit crimes for the pettiest of reasons. If there have been any recent quarrels..."
Peyton shook his head, still dazed. "Everyone loved Anita."
Of course they did. Amazing how universally beloved the recent dead always were.
"Did she socialize a lot? Belong to any clubs, charitable societies... church groups?" Dammit, how exactly did one go about asking if a recently murdered woman might've belonged to a cult?
Mrs. Carlisle frowned in polite confusion. "She was in the gardening club."
Another twenty minutes of awkward questioning revealed that the Peytons were Episcopalian, that they went to church every Sunday (the recent dead always had perfect church attendance too), that they got along with everyone they knew, and that Jeremy Peyton had not seen or heard anything suspicious in or near his house at any point during the previous week. Victor was just about to wrap it up and go interview the neighbors, when Winchester abruptly spoke up.
"Mr. Peyton, when you first saw the fire, did you notice anything unusual about the flames?"
Peyton looked blank. "Unusual?"
"Any strange colors or smells? Anything at all out of the ordinary?"
"My baby's room was on fire, Agent!" Peyton's voice rose in pitch with every word. "My wife was screaming in the flames! Is that 'out of the ordinary' enough for you?"
"I know. I'm sorry." Winchester put his cup down on the coffee table with an audible clink. He really did look sorry, his face nearly as drawn and pale as Peyton's. "This is hard for you to talk about, and I understand. But if we're going to find out what happened to your wife, then we need to know everything you saw. Now, when you saw Anita in the flames, where was she, exactly? Where in the room, I mean?"
"She..." Peyton began to speak, then trailed off into twitchy uncertainty. "She was over Julie's crib."
"Over it?" Winchester leaned forward. He looked tight-strung and eager, a bloodhound on the scent. "As in standing over it? Bending? Did you have to go past her to get to Julie?"
What the fuck? This was precisely why Victor hadn't wanted a new partner. Winchester was clearly going somewhere specific with his line of questioning, but Victor had no idea where, and he had no background for interpreting the kid's cues. Which left him with nothing to do except fume in silence and hope that Winchester didn't fuck it up.
"I d-don't-- Sh-she w-wasn't--" Peyton's face looked pasty, and a fine sheen of sweat was breaking out on his upper lip. "I couldn't reach her, was too far, I c-couldn't--"
"But she was by the crib, right? And you got Julie from the crib, didn't you? Anita must've been right there."
"Are you accusing--" Mrs. Carlisle began with rising anger, but Winchester simply ignored her and plowed on.
"Anything you can tell us, Mr. Peyton. Anything at all, no matter how crazy you think it might sound. We're not here to judge you, we're here to find out what really happened, and we need the facts. Please."
"It couldn't be real!" Peyton burst out. "It looked real, but I know it wasn't. I was in shock, I must've imagined it... She couldn't have been--"
Winchester's face was utterly sincere and sympathetic, and utterly implacable. "Where was she, Mr. Peyton?"
"She was burning on the ceiling!" Peyton sobbed out, and that was the last coherent words they got out of him.
"What the hell was that?" Victor demanded as soon as they were outside and out of earshot.
Winchester's shrug was just a little too casual to be convincing. "You heard the guy. He was in shock, must've been hallucinating."
"Bullshit," Victor growled. "You knew he was going to say that."
"Yep."
"How?"
"If you read my notes tonight, you'll know."
Victor sucked in a deep breath, let it out slowly, and reminded himself that strangling an ATF employee would probably result in a lot of paperwork.
"Just tell me, dammit."
They reached the car, and Winchester made a big production of digging for his keys. Victor was toying with the idea of beating an answer out of him when Winchester finally spoke.
"The Saginaw fire in '83. Claudia Miller's husband claimed she was pinned to the ceiling when she burned."
Victor stared at him over the roof of the car, but Winchester's face remained perfectly deadpan as he climbed into the driver's seat. Victor stood there a moment longer, then got in himself, slamming the door with a little more force than necessary.
"You're telling me that two totally unconnected guys had the exact same hallucination under the exact same circumstances, twenty-two years apart?"
"Well..." Winchester paused with his hand hovering over the key in the ignition. The expression on his face was neutral, but he seemed to be avoiding Victor's eyes. "What's the alternative?"
Victor glared straight ahead through the rain-spattered windshield. The pewter-colored clouds overhead offered up no useful answers.
"The alternative," he said, "is that some person or persons unknown broke into the Peytons' house, overpowered Anita Peyton, doused her in some sort of high-temperature fuel, nailed her to the goddamn ceiling and set her on fire -- oh, and they did this in less than a minute, and without disturbing her husband in the room next door. But hey, none of that was a problem, because they -- or someone they know -- had already figured out how to do it way back in 1983."
"Yeah." Winchester sighed. "Those are pretty much our options."
"This case sucks."
"Like a Hoover. And I don't mean Edgar J."
It was nearly four o'clock by then, and they'd both been running on bottled water and coffee since early morning. Victor was ready to stat gnawing on his shoes, and Winchester looked as if he felt the same.
"I know where we can get the best burger in town," he announced, and swung a left onto a one-way street heading east. "Used to date a girl from Grand Rapids while I was at school. Went home with her a couple of times, learned my way around. Then she graduated, got a job in LA and dumped my ass." He didn't sound too broken up about it.
"That's nice," Victor said in his best bored-to-death voice. After the recent fiasco with Caroline, he was in no mood to hear about anyone else's love life, past or present.
Winchester, predictably, failed to take the hint. "It was pretty hot while it lasted, though. She did gymnastics and dance in high school. Man, the way she could bend her--"
"Do I look like I care, Winchester?"
Winchester smirked and quirked one eyebrow at him.
"You got a girlfriend, Victor?"
"None of your goddamn business. And it's Agent Henriksen to you."
"Boyfriend?"
"We are not having this conversation."
"Hey, you can tell me, I won't judge." Winchester gave him a wink. "My kid brother was gay for about six months his freshman year at Berkeley before he figured out that Dad and I didn't care, and then he had to go and look for other ways to be rebellious."
"Which part of 'not having this conversation' are you failing to comprehend?"
"All right, all right. Sheesh. Someone's grumpy when they haven't had their lunch."
The burger restaurant turned out to be at the edge of a touristy historical district, full of lovingly restored old houses with plaques on the gates. It was too late for lunch and too early for dinner, so the place was mostly empty. They grabbed a booth by the window, and Winchester proceeded to make a complete wreck of all his rock-n-roll rebel pretensions by quietly saying grace over his bacon cheeseburger with extra pickle and a side of onion rings.
"Son of a preacher man," he muttered, looking faintly defensive, and proceeded to drown his onion rings in half a bottle of A1 sauce.
The burgers were as good as promised, and the dessert menu listed pecan bourbon pie. Victor decided he could tolerate Winchester's existence for a while longer after all.
By mutual agreement, they exchanged manila folders over the table and read each other's case files while they ate. Victor had to give Winchester credit -- the kid did a good job of putting his research together, especially given the fact that he was working with information over two decades out of date. He had police and fire department reports, crime lab reports, building blueprints, copies of witness statements, clippings from local newspapers...
The documents on the Miller case confirmed that Jim Miller had, in fact, initially claimed that he'd seen his wife burning on the nursery ceiling. He'd recanted the story two weeks later, admitting that the smoke had been too thick for him to see his wife in the room, and that the ceiling image came from a recurring nightmare he'd had after the fire.
Which, now that Victor thought about it, was a pretty shaky basis for assuming that Peyton would come up with the same story. Wild guess, he supposed, which Winchester would insist on calling a gut feeling.
"We need to dig deeper into these two guys," Victor said, "see if they had any acquaintances in common. Anyone who could've known Miller's story and told it to Peyton."
"Could be." Winchester popped the last onion ring into his mouth and waved his empty coffee cup at their waitress, who blithely ignored him. "Saginaw's only a couple of hours away. Somebody could've moved here from there. You think that's what put the idea into Peyton's head?"
"It happens," Victor said. "Guy hears a story like that, it sticks in his mind. Then something similar happens to him, and he dredges it up again, thinks it's a real memory. He might not even remember where he got it in the first place."
"Okay." Winchester nodded. "First thing first, though. We go see the scene."
The Peytons' house had an actual, honest-to-God white picket fence around it, though the idyllic effect was spoiled by the yellow crime scene tape and the black-and-white parked out front. The brick facade facing the street was undamaged, but the lawn was a thick, muddy mess where the firefighters had trampled around to the back.
Strictly speaking, they were supposed to coordinate with the local authorities at the crime scene. But Winchester said he wanted to see the place by himself first, and Victor had no objections; having a houseful of cops and firefighters crowding around while he was trying to work wasn't his idea of a good time either. So they arrived without calling ahead, and Victor flashed his badge and his friendliest smile at the two cops in the squad car while Winchester hauled his evidence kit from the Impala's trunk.
Victor expected Winchester to head straight inside -- to get out of the rain if nothing else -- but he circled around the outside first, taking pictures with a digital camera and sketching the layout of all the doors and windows on a pad. Victor trudged after him, feeling useless and damp and increasingly bored. He was almost desperate enough to try "How about them Cubs?" when Winchester finally turned toward the front door.
It was dark by then, and the electricity in the house was out. Victor took his pocket flashlight from his coat, while Winchester produced an actual hard hat with an attached light from the kit bag. They put on latex gloves and inched through the undamaged first floor at a snail's pace while Winchester snapped pictures of what seemed like every inch of the walls and floor. Victor examined the doors and windows, but saw no signs of forced entry. There were muddy footprints everywhere, but those had probably been left by the firefighters. If the arsonist left any traces as he came through, it would take a CSI team to spot them now.
The nursery was on the second floor, at the end of a long carpeted hallway. The stink of smoke still hung in the air, thick and suffocating. Victor's eyes itched, and every breath tasted of ashes.
The place wasn't as badly damaged as the others Victor had looked at in the past six months, possibly because the firehouse was less than a quarter of a mile away, and the response had been remarkably quick. Still, the charred walls and the jagged hole in the middle of the ceiling looked gruesome enough, especially since Victor couldn't help remembering that some of the damp clumps of ash on the floor had to be the remains of a human being.
He wondered how long it had taken Anita Peyton to die, if she'd been conscious when it happened, if she had at least known, at the end, that her husband and child had gotten out safely. Victor didn't think there was such a thing as a good way to die, and there sure as hell wasn't a good way to murder somebody, but fire seemed worse than most, more savage somehow.
Victor didn't like to think of himself as a brutal man, but he honestly wasn't sure what he might do if he ever faced this arsonist alone in a locked room.
Winchester looked as if he might be thinking along the same lines. He reached the nursery doorway and stopped as if he'd walked into a wall, eyes wary and jaw clenched tight. It occurred to Victor that this might well be, if not the kid's first field case, then at least his first murder scene. He hung back, ready to pretend not to notice any outward signs of distress, but all Winchester did was shuffle his feet a bit and tug on his tie.
"Here." He turned and thrust the camera into Victor's hands. "Can you take photos while I do the rest? It'll get us out of here faster."
"No problem," Victor said.
The nursery wallpaper had kittens and butterflies on it. The carpet -- what they could see of it beneath the soot and the rubble -- was pale pink. It squelched a little under their feet, still damp from the firehose spray.
Victor took shots of the scorched walls, the remains of the crib, the blackened beams revealed by the collapsed ceiling. Winchester paced the room in a slow circle, sketching and scribbling on his pad. He scraped paint chips from the walls and stowed them away in neatly labeled pill boxes, snipped fiber samples from the carpet and the drapes, took out a tape measure and carefully noted the dimensions of the room and the location of every piece of furniture.
"Let's see what else we've got here..." Winchester pulled out a small handheld scanner of some sort, and swept it at the walls and ceiling. The gadget immediately gave off a long, piercing wail and blinked some numbers on an LCD panel.
"What the hell is that thing?" Victor growled. The noise was making his ears hurt.
"Trade secret." Winchester grinned at him, then quickly held up one hand in a placating gesture before Victor had a chance to tell him exactly what he thought of that. "Kidding. It scans for atypical emissions, that's all." He took a step toward the window, and the wailing got louder. Victor had to practically shout to make himself heard over the noise.
"Atypical as in what?"
"Atypical as in not something you'd expect to find in a nice suburban nursery." Winchester looked distracted, more focused on the window than on Victor. He crouched down, put the scanner on the floor and reached into the kit bag again, this time producing a small brush and a pair of tweezers. He used the brush to clear away some of the broken glass, then picked something up from the carpet with the tweezers. "Like this, for instance."
Victor leaned in to get a better look at the small reddish-brown pebble Winchester was holding up to the light.
"What is it?"
"Won't know for sure until the lab results come back." Winchester dropped the pebble into a plastic baggie, labeled it, and tucked it away. "But at a guess, I'd say amorphous sulfur. It's what happens when molten sulfur gets cooled down really fast. This must've formed when the fire-hose spray came in."
"Why would there be sulfur on the floor in a baby's room?" Victor asked.
Winchester looked grim. "No good reason."
"It's not a fuel or an explosive, right?" Victor frowned as fragmented memories of high-school chemistry surfaced for the first time in years. "Wait, don't they make gunpowder out of it?"
"Yep. But you don't get a smoldering fire with gunpowder. Or a sustained flame. You just get a big boom. And besides, what kind of psycho freak breaks into a nursery and then sits down to mix gunpowder from scratch?"
"The same kind of freak that starts fires on ceilings?"
"Okay, you got me there."
Winchester looked as if he'd be occupied with the carpet for a while longer, so Victor turned his attention to the middle of the room. That was where the ceiling had fallen in, crushing and burying the crib under it moments after Jeremy Peyton had run out with his daughter in his arms. The burning ceiling tiles had ignited the carpet where they fell, and Victor's shoes kept sticking to the floor in spots where the synthetic carpet pad had melted into sludge and then cooled.
Victor took some pictures of the rubble, then carefully lifted a couple of scorched tiles out of the way and aimed his flashlight beam at the mess beneath. He knew what he was going to find, of course, but it still made his stomach turn when the light picked out the blackened fragments of a human skull.
"Fuck." He shifted the flashlight to his left hand and lifted the camera with his right, zoomed in for a couple of close-up shots. "Hey, Winchester, you want to bag any samples here, or do you want to leave it for the M.E. to--" he broke off because Winchester was making a soft, strangled noise and stumbling from the room, one hand clapped over his mouth.
Victor followed him out just in time to see the bathroom door slam. There was the sound of running water, loud enough to cover any retching noises that might otherwise be audible. After a minute or so, the toilet flushed. Another minute, and the water shut off. Winchester stepped out into the hallway and stopped, adjusting his tie.
"I think," Victor said, "we'd better leave the rest for the CSI guys and the medical examiner. We've seen enough on our own, right?"
"Right." Winchester's voice was raspy. He took a step toward the nursery door and stopped again, shoulders hunched.
Victor waited a bit, then went and fetched the evidence kit back himself.
Chapter 3
Chapter 2
Anita Peyton (neé Carlisle) had been born in Grand Rapids, lived there her entire life, and died there at age twenty-four. She left behind a husband, a widowed mother, and a baby daughter who would grow up to know her mother only from photographs. One of those photographs -- a laughing young woman in a white summer dress -- was prominently displayed on top of an upright piano in the immaculately clean living room where Mrs. Carlisle had conducted Victor and Winchester when they arrived to speak to Jeremy Peyton.
Peyton looked like the kind of guy who played quarterback in college and then married the homecoming queen -- blond, blue-eyed, and as wholesome as a man could possibly look in wrinkled sweats and a day's worth of stubble. He slumped against the back of his mother-in-law's pristine white leather couch, looking as if he'd never again have the strength to move from the spot.
Mrs. Carlisle had clearly made an attempt to pull herself together, putting on a clean blouse and skirt and pinning her hair up. But her eyes were bloodshot, and her voice trembled on the edge of breaking as she made the obligatory offer of coffee or tea.
"Coffee's fine, ma'am," Winchester said.
Victor had hoped to question Peyton alone while Winchester examined the burn site, but the kid had insisted on sticking with him, apparently determined not to miss a single second of the murder-investigating experience. Victor tried to remember if he'd ever been that young and gung-ho as a rookie, and decided that no, he'd always had more common sense than that.
Winchester's enthusiasm was wilting now, though, smothered by the thick atmosphere of grief in the room. He looked tense and awkward, and didn't offer even a token reaction when Victor hissed "Shut up and let me do the talking" into his ear as they took their seats.
Peyton's story was drearily familiar, differing only in minor details from what Victor had gotten from the other survivors. Peyton and his wife Anita had been in bed when their daughter started crying in her crib, and Anita had gone to check on her. Less than a minute later, Peyton had heard her scream. He'd rushed into the nursery to find the walls and ceiling already ablaze, his wife engulfed by the flames. It was all he'd been able to do to get the baby and himself out.
"There was no time," he kept repeating in a flat, shell-shocked voice. "I tried to get to her, there was no time. I couldn't... no time."
"We know you did all you could," Victor murmured awkwardly into his coffee cup. This was the part of the job he always hated most. He'd never found the right tone and manner to put grieving strangers at ease. He and Reidy had a suitable division of labor worked out. Reidy dealt with the victims and family members, with nervous witnesses and small children. Victor saved his normal brand of interrogation technique for recalcitrant witnesses and prime suspects. But Reidy wasn't there, and Winchester was an unknown quantity, which left Victor to muddle through.
He cleared his throat and tried to pitch his voice to something that at least vaguely resembled a soothing tone. "Mr. Peyton, Mrs. Carlisle. I know it's a painful topic to consider at a time like this, but can you think of anyone who might wish your family ill?"
Peyton gave him a dead-eyed stare. Mrs. Carlisle looked startled.
"Of course not!" she burst out. "I can't even imagine... do you really believe someone set that fire on purpose?"
"We're just trying to examine all the possibilities, ma'am. People can commit crimes for the pettiest of reasons. If there have been any recent quarrels..."
Peyton shook his head, still dazed. "Everyone loved Anita."
Of course they did. Amazing how universally beloved the recent dead always were.
"Did she socialize a lot? Belong to any clubs, charitable societies... church groups?" Dammit, how exactly did one go about asking if a recently murdered woman might've belonged to a cult?
Mrs. Carlisle frowned in polite confusion. "She was in the gardening club."
Another twenty minutes of awkward questioning revealed that the Peytons were Episcopalian, that they went to church every Sunday (the recent dead always had perfect church attendance too), that they got along with everyone they knew, and that Jeremy Peyton had not seen or heard anything suspicious in or near his house at any point during the previous week. Victor was just about to wrap it up and go interview the neighbors, when Winchester abruptly spoke up.
"Mr. Peyton, when you first saw the fire, did you notice anything unusual about the flames?"
Peyton looked blank. "Unusual?"
"Any strange colors or smells? Anything at all out of the ordinary?"
"My baby's room was on fire, Agent!" Peyton's voice rose in pitch with every word. "My wife was screaming in the flames! Is that 'out of the ordinary' enough for you?"
"I know. I'm sorry." Winchester put his cup down on the coffee table with an audible clink. He really did look sorry, his face nearly as drawn and pale as Peyton's. "This is hard for you to talk about, and I understand. But if we're going to find out what happened to your wife, then we need to know everything you saw. Now, when you saw Anita in the flames, where was she, exactly? Where in the room, I mean?"
"She..." Peyton began to speak, then trailed off into twitchy uncertainty. "She was over Julie's crib."
"Over it?" Winchester leaned forward. He looked tight-strung and eager, a bloodhound on the scent. "As in standing over it? Bending? Did you have to go past her to get to Julie?"
What the fuck? This was precisely why Victor hadn't wanted a new partner. Winchester was clearly going somewhere specific with his line of questioning, but Victor had no idea where, and he had no background for interpreting the kid's cues. Which left him with nothing to do except fume in silence and hope that Winchester didn't fuck it up.
"I d-don't-- Sh-she w-wasn't--" Peyton's face looked pasty, and a fine sheen of sweat was breaking out on his upper lip. "I couldn't reach her, was too far, I c-couldn't--"
"But she was by the crib, right? And you got Julie from the crib, didn't you? Anita must've been right there."
"Are you accusing--" Mrs. Carlisle began with rising anger, but Winchester simply ignored her and plowed on.
"Anything you can tell us, Mr. Peyton. Anything at all, no matter how crazy you think it might sound. We're not here to judge you, we're here to find out what really happened, and we need the facts. Please."
"It couldn't be real!" Peyton burst out. "It looked real, but I know it wasn't. I was in shock, I must've imagined it... She couldn't have been--"
Winchester's face was utterly sincere and sympathetic, and utterly implacable. "Where was she, Mr. Peyton?"
"She was burning on the ceiling!" Peyton sobbed out, and that was the last coherent words they got out of him.
"What the hell was that?" Victor demanded as soon as they were outside and out of earshot.
Winchester's shrug was just a little too casual to be convincing. "You heard the guy. He was in shock, must've been hallucinating."
"Bullshit," Victor growled. "You knew he was going to say that."
"Yep."
"How?"
"If you read my notes tonight, you'll know."
Victor sucked in a deep breath, let it out slowly, and reminded himself that strangling an ATF employee would probably result in a lot of paperwork.
"Just tell me, dammit."
They reached the car, and Winchester made a big production of digging for his keys. Victor was toying with the idea of beating an answer out of him when Winchester finally spoke.
"The Saginaw fire in '83. Claudia Miller's husband claimed she was pinned to the ceiling when she burned."
Victor stared at him over the roof of the car, but Winchester's face remained perfectly deadpan as he climbed into the driver's seat. Victor stood there a moment longer, then got in himself, slamming the door with a little more force than necessary.
"You're telling me that two totally unconnected guys had the exact same hallucination under the exact same circumstances, twenty-two years apart?"
"Well..." Winchester paused with his hand hovering over the key in the ignition. The expression on his face was neutral, but he seemed to be avoiding Victor's eyes. "What's the alternative?"
Victor glared straight ahead through the rain-spattered windshield. The pewter-colored clouds overhead offered up no useful answers.
"The alternative," he said, "is that some person or persons unknown broke into the Peytons' house, overpowered Anita Peyton, doused her in some sort of high-temperature fuel, nailed her to the goddamn ceiling and set her on fire -- oh, and they did this in less than a minute, and without disturbing her husband in the room next door. But hey, none of that was a problem, because they -- or someone they know -- had already figured out how to do it way back in 1983."
"Yeah." Winchester sighed. "Those are pretty much our options."
"This case sucks."
"Like a Hoover. And I don't mean Edgar J."
It was nearly four o'clock by then, and they'd both been running on bottled water and coffee since early morning. Victor was ready to stat gnawing on his shoes, and Winchester looked as if he felt the same.
"I know where we can get the best burger in town," he announced, and swung a left onto a one-way street heading east. "Used to date a girl from Grand Rapids while I was at school. Went home with her a couple of times, learned my way around. Then she graduated, got a job in LA and dumped my ass." He didn't sound too broken up about it.
"That's nice," Victor said in his best bored-to-death voice. After the recent fiasco with Caroline, he was in no mood to hear about anyone else's love life, past or present.
Winchester, predictably, failed to take the hint. "It was pretty hot while it lasted, though. She did gymnastics and dance in high school. Man, the way she could bend her--"
"Do I look like I care, Winchester?"
Winchester smirked and quirked one eyebrow at him.
"You got a girlfriend, Victor?"
"None of your goddamn business. And it's Agent Henriksen to you."
"Boyfriend?"
"We are not having this conversation."
"Hey, you can tell me, I won't judge." Winchester gave him a wink. "My kid brother was gay for about six months his freshman year at Berkeley before he figured out that Dad and I didn't care, and then he had to go and look for other ways to be rebellious."
"Which part of 'not having this conversation' are you failing to comprehend?"
"All right, all right. Sheesh. Someone's grumpy when they haven't had their lunch."
The burger restaurant turned out to be at the edge of a touristy historical district, full of lovingly restored old houses with plaques on the gates. It was too late for lunch and too early for dinner, so the place was mostly empty. They grabbed a booth by the window, and Winchester proceeded to make a complete wreck of all his rock-n-roll rebel pretensions by quietly saying grace over his bacon cheeseburger with extra pickle and a side of onion rings.
"Son of a preacher man," he muttered, looking faintly defensive, and proceeded to drown his onion rings in half a bottle of A1 sauce.
The burgers were as good as promised, and the dessert menu listed pecan bourbon pie. Victor decided he could tolerate Winchester's existence for a while longer after all.
By mutual agreement, they exchanged manila folders over the table and read each other's case files while they ate. Victor had to give Winchester credit -- the kid did a good job of putting his research together, especially given the fact that he was working with information over two decades out of date. He had police and fire department reports, crime lab reports, building blueprints, copies of witness statements, clippings from local newspapers...
The documents on the Miller case confirmed that Jim Miller had, in fact, initially claimed that he'd seen his wife burning on the nursery ceiling. He'd recanted the story two weeks later, admitting that the smoke had been too thick for him to see his wife in the room, and that the ceiling image came from a recurring nightmare he'd had after the fire.
Which, now that Victor thought about it, was a pretty shaky basis for assuming that Peyton would come up with the same story. Wild guess, he supposed, which Winchester would insist on calling a gut feeling.
"We need to dig deeper into these two guys," Victor said, "see if they had any acquaintances in common. Anyone who could've known Miller's story and told it to Peyton."
"Could be." Winchester popped the last onion ring into his mouth and waved his empty coffee cup at their waitress, who blithely ignored him. "Saginaw's only a couple of hours away. Somebody could've moved here from there. You think that's what put the idea into Peyton's head?"
"It happens," Victor said. "Guy hears a story like that, it sticks in his mind. Then something similar happens to him, and he dredges it up again, thinks it's a real memory. He might not even remember where he got it in the first place."
"Okay." Winchester nodded. "First thing first, though. We go see the scene."
The Peytons' house had an actual, honest-to-God white picket fence around it, though the idyllic effect was spoiled by the yellow crime scene tape and the black-and-white parked out front. The brick facade facing the street was undamaged, but the lawn was a thick, muddy mess where the firefighters had trampled around to the back.
Strictly speaking, they were supposed to coordinate with the local authorities at the crime scene. But Winchester said he wanted to see the place by himself first, and Victor had no objections; having a houseful of cops and firefighters crowding around while he was trying to work wasn't his idea of a good time either. So they arrived without calling ahead, and Victor flashed his badge and his friendliest smile at the two cops in the squad car while Winchester hauled his evidence kit from the Impala's trunk.
Victor expected Winchester to head straight inside -- to get out of the rain if nothing else -- but he circled around the outside first, taking pictures with a digital camera and sketching the layout of all the doors and windows on a pad. Victor trudged after him, feeling useless and damp and increasingly bored. He was almost desperate enough to try "How about them Cubs?" when Winchester finally turned toward the front door.
It was dark by then, and the electricity in the house was out. Victor took his pocket flashlight from his coat, while Winchester produced an actual hard hat with an attached light from the kit bag. They put on latex gloves and inched through the undamaged first floor at a snail's pace while Winchester snapped pictures of what seemed like every inch of the walls and floor. Victor examined the doors and windows, but saw no signs of forced entry. There were muddy footprints everywhere, but those had probably been left by the firefighters. If the arsonist left any traces as he came through, it would take a CSI team to spot them now.
The nursery was on the second floor, at the end of a long carpeted hallway. The stink of smoke still hung in the air, thick and suffocating. Victor's eyes itched, and every breath tasted of ashes.
The place wasn't as badly damaged as the others Victor had looked at in the past six months, possibly because the firehouse was less than a quarter of a mile away, and the response had been remarkably quick. Still, the charred walls and the jagged hole in the middle of the ceiling looked gruesome enough, especially since Victor couldn't help remembering that some of the damp clumps of ash on the floor had to be the remains of a human being.
He wondered how long it had taken Anita Peyton to die, if she'd been conscious when it happened, if she had at least known, at the end, that her husband and child had gotten out safely. Victor didn't think there was such a thing as a good way to die, and there sure as hell wasn't a good way to murder somebody, but fire seemed worse than most, more savage somehow.
Victor didn't like to think of himself as a brutal man, but he honestly wasn't sure what he might do if he ever faced this arsonist alone in a locked room.
Winchester looked as if he might be thinking along the same lines. He reached the nursery doorway and stopped as if he'd walked into a wall, eyes wary and jaw clenched tight. It occurred to Victor that this might well be, if not the kid's first field case, then at least his first murder scene. He hung back, ready to pretend not to notice any outward signs of distress, but all Winchester did was shuffle his feet a bit and tug on his tie.
"Here." He turned and thrust the camera into Victor's hands. "Can you take photos while I do the rest? It'll get us out of here faster."
"No problem," Victor said.
The nursery wallpaper had kittens and butterflies on it. The carpet -- what they could see of it beneath the soot and the rubble -- was pale pink. It squelched a little under their feet, still damp from the firehose spray.
Victor took shots of the scorched walls, the remains of the crib, the blackened beams revealed by the collapsed ceiling. Winchester paced the room in a slow circle, sketching and scribbling on his pad. He scraped paint chips from the walls and stowed them away in neatly labeled pill boxes, snipped fiber samples from the carpet and the drapes, took out a tape measure and carefully noted the dimensions of the room and the location of every piece of furniture.
"Let's see what else we've got here..." Winchester pulled out a small handheld scanner of some sort, and swept it at the walls and ceiling. The gadget immediately gave off a long, piercing wail and blinked some numbers on an LCD panel.
"What the hell is that thing?" Victor growled. The noise was making his ears hurt.
"Trade secret." Winchester grinned at him, then quickly held up one hand in a placating gesture before Victor had a chance to tell him exactly what he thought of that. "Kidding. It scans for atypical emissions, that's all." He took a step toward the window, and the wailing got louder. Victor had to practically shout to make himself heard over the noise.
"Atypical as in what?"
"Atypical as in not something you'd expect to find in a nice suburban nursery." Winchester looked distracted, more focused on the window than on Victor. He crouched down, put the scanner on the floor and reached into the kit bag again, this time producing a small brush and a pair of tweezers. He used the brush to clear away some of the broken glass, then picked something up from the carpet with the tweezers. "Like this, for instance."
Victor leaned in to get a better look at the small reddish-brown pebble Winchester was holding up to the light.
"What is it?"
"Won't know for sure until the lab results come back." Winchester dropped the pebble into a plastic baggie, labeled it, and tucked it away. "But at a guess, I'd say amorphous sulfur. It's what happens when molten sulfur gets cooled down really fast. This must've formed when the fire-hose spray came in."
"Why would there be sulfur on the floor in a baby's room?" Victor asked.
Winchester looked grim. "No good reason."
"It's not a fuel or an explosive, right?" Victor frowned as fragmented memories of high-school chemistry surfaced for the first time in years. "Wait, don't they make gunpowder out of it?"
"Yep. But you don't get a smoldering fire with gunpowder. Or a sustained flame. You just get a big boom. And besides, what kind of psycho freak breaks into a nursery and then sits down to mix gunpowder from scratch?"
"The same kind of freak that starts fires on ceilings?"
"Okay, you got me there."
Winchester looked as if he'd be occupied with the carpet for a while longer, so Victor turned his attention to the middle of the room. That was where the ceiling had fallen in, crushing and burying the crib under it moments after Jeremy Peyton had run out with his daughter in his arms. The burning ceiling tiles had ignited the carpet where they fell, and Victor's shoes kept sticking to the floor in spots where the synthetic carpet pad had melted into sludge and then cooled.
Victor took some pictures of the rubble, then carefully lifted a couple of scorched tiles out of the way and aimed his flashlight beam at the mess beneath. He knew what he was going to find, of course, but it still made his stomach turn when the light picked out the blackened fragments of a human skull.
"Fuck." He shifted the flashlight to his left hand and lifted the camera with his right, zoomed in for a couple of close-up shots. "Hey, Winchester, you want to bag any samples here, or do you want to leave it for the M.E. to--" he broke off because Winchester was making a soft, strangled noise and stumbling from the room, one hand clapped over his mouth.
Victor followed him out just in time to see the bathroom door slam. There was the sound of running water, loud enough to cover any retching noises that might otherwise be audible. After a minute or so, the toilet flushed. Another minute, and the water shut off. Winchester stepped out into the hallway and stopped, adjusting his tie.
"I think," Victor said, "we'd better leave the rest for the CSI guys and the medical examiner. We've seen enough on our own, right?"
"Right." Winchester's voice was raspy. He took a step toward the nursery door and stopped again, shoulders hunched.
Victor waited a bit, then went and fetched the evidence kit back himself.
Chapter 3